Books Briefly
Books Briefly Father and Son HALF THE WAY HOME by Adam Hochschild Viking Penguin. 198 pp. $15.95. After graduating from Harvard, Adam Hochschild worked as a reporter at the San Francisco...
...The intricate plot develops against the backdrop of two warring clans, the Fieldings and the Allardacks...
...Nat Hentoff has known them all, it seems, and in this memoir of his childhood and youth he tells of his encounters with the practitioners of that genre...
...17.95...
...If Boston Boy had an index—unfortunately it hasn't—it would serve as a quick reference guide to most of America's jazz greats...
...A refreshing romance lightens the skulduggery...
...While the elder Hochschild, like his father before him, headed a multinational corporation that made its profits from mining and strip mining in Appalachia, South Africa, and the Third World, he individually had a sense of social justice, respect for unions, and a strong commitment to peace (he opposed the Vietnam war from the start) and conservation of their beloved Adirondacks...
...Freedom Fighter BOSTON BOY by Nat Hentoff Knopf...
...Justice Is Done BREAK IN by Dick Francis Putnam...
...To top off the action-packed story, Francis adds the fillip of tongue-in-cheek comments on royal lineage and class...
...But this slim volume tells us much more—about anti-Semitism and radical politics in Boston, about Hentoffs early work as a journalist and union organizer, about the unique combination of circumstances that made him into one of this nation's most vigorous and articulate defenders of individual freedom...
...Boston Boy tells us how he got to know what he knows...
...His deeply disciplined father intimidated young Hochschild and widened their separation as human beings...
...In Break In he returns to his original turf, horse racing...
...A sensitive reminiscence of an ambiguous relationship...
...The only child of a wealthy German-Jewish family, Hochschild grew up in luxury in New York and Eagle Nest, an estate deep in the Adirondacks...
...The hero and narrator is Christmas (Kit) Fielding, a steeplechase jockey who comes to the rescue of his twin sister Holly and her beleaguered husband, horse trainer Bobby Al-lardack...
...The feud becomes rather tiresome, but the fast action shifts from character assassination and races (one afternoon Kit wins four) to a bad fall to break-ins, telephone bugging, attempted bribery, sabotage, and brutality that includes knives and stun guns...
...For some twenty years Dick Francis has been turning out a suspense novel annually...
...317 pp...
...In this "memoir of father and son," he looks back over the years of estrangement from his father and the slow transformation to affection and love...
...A summer in South Africa and civil-rights activity in the South opened Hochschild's mind to the differences of class and race...
...Hentoff writes with equal authority about music and education and First Amendment law...
...After graduating from Harvard, Adam Hochschild worked as a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle and as an editor at Ramparts before he became a co-founder of Mother Jones...
...176 pp...
Vol. 50 • July 1986 • No. 7
